Tired of re-loading trying to get to judaism (round 38 at the earliest, AI reported to sometimes get it as early as round 26
) in time, without hinduism or buddhism getting snapped up by independents?
Here's an alternative, counterintuitive even, win-strategy involving no whipping and Taoism that worked for me
Breaking news were: Hinduism 2370BC, buddhism 2050BC, Oracle 1500BC, taoism 850BC, chrisitanity um.. didn't take note if it (seemed easy), islam 600AD, Hanging Gardens 740AD.
First things first:
Lahore start with a twist: settle on the grain E of marble, since you'll get calendar before agriculture
Build order: Worker, warrior, hindu monastery, buddhist monastery, Oracle, 1st temple (work the priest from the moment you have the temple)
Tech: Masonry, meditation, priesthood (1stUHV), writing, fishing, sailing, Oracle pop: mathematics, calendar (Taoism!)
Worker works the marble (Lahore works marble from now on till the end of the game)and then has nothing to do until calendar - it sucks - but it's necessary if you want to found 5 religions.
1st warrior goes for goodie huts (S India, Anatolia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Portugal), then camp him close to Greece for contact w. Greece, Rome, Carthage, Egypt, etc. If you get another warrior or a scout from an early hut send him to Beijing, otherwise send your 2nd warrior to Beijing. Arriving in Beijing you need to cause enough havoc for the Chinese to miss calendar (we're talking 1 or 2 rounds here). There's incense, I think it is, west of Beijing as its highest yielding commerce square.
Time your oracle pop with getting sailing at the same round - netting mathematics so you can go directly to teching calendar.
You made it to taoism? Alright! that's the biggest challenge covered.
Route to christianity and islam:
Build order: Settler, 2nd temple (run 2 priests from then on until 2nd GP), then.. your choice of Hanging Gardens, granaries, workers, settlers, spears, catapults and phants eventually
Trade: Carthage has Alphabet, Greece will get it soon enough. Try getting Alphabet for yourself to open trade with Persia, which should have Monarchy. Trade around for some worker techs (agriculture, animal husbandre, hunting, roads) to build up that land of yours, bronze for forest chopping if going for the Hanging Gardens and iron to secure the iron on the hill south of Delhi, but the crux is getting monarchy in time to open up research on divine right.
Tech: There's a little freedom here as long as you have teched around 1000 beakers of divine right at about the same round your 2nd GP turns up.
GP: 1st one bulbs theocracy, 2nd bulbs the remaining half of divine right - 2nd UHV covered
Expansion: 2nd city, Delhi, on the river, 1E of the phant. Funny note here: Sefdom civic actually makes worked quite well - no time to build workers + lots of land around.
Security By now you'll have barb. phants in your neighborhood and you've likely spent all your 100% win barb. battles on warriors and stuff around the globe, so you'll want to hook up that iron south of Delhi. You will need spears.
After this.. expansion. I'd advice you to be smarter than I was though, and do less over-expansion: 3rd city around where Bangladesh is, 4th graps the fish on the east coast, 5th west coast sugar. I settled another one in the south at the cow but that was silly since it stopped the Bangladesh city from growing for way too long - whipping would have worked, I didn't use it.
Conquest: Independent city of Pagan in Burma - there's a banana to be worked there, then when Persia starts crumbling, as it hopefully does, time a nice assault of phants, catapults and spears and take them out. I got Parsa, Pura and Artacaona, then launched an abortive assault on Babylonia as Arabia turned up on the field.
I suggest you forget about China as it's just too far away.
By now your economy will be in ruins, mine was. In the last 20odd rounds I was disbanding units every round. In a dramatic final round, the Chinese took an undefended Aratacoana, which had been whipped down to size 1 the round earlier, while at the same time, the Bangladesh city grew by one.. and this made the difference
1200AD Indian population: 2.644.000
1200AD Chinese population: 2.639.000
Now you go and play it - you can do the population thing much better by whipping settlers and granaries and having fewer but bigger cities.
Completed Rhye's Monarch UHV's to date: Egypt, Greece, China, Arabia, Spain, Persia, Carthage, India
